Task force/Wikipedia Quality

The task force process is completed. Some task forces may be reconstituted to discuss incomplete issues. Please discuss on the Village Pump.

Relevant Wikimedia-pedia Articles

Participants should be sure they're familiar with the relevant background material. They should also work to identify gaps and collect and summarize more information as it becomes available.

• Wikipedia quality

Recommendations

Recommendations should be based upon Template:Recommendations. The following are stub pages for this task force's recommendations:

• 1: Global thematic projects
  
• 2: Create "Senior editor" status
  
• 3: Re-emphasize core values
  

Members

• Yaroslav Blanter
• FT2
• User:Slrubenstein
• User:Piotrus
• Woudloper
• Anthony Brett Adams
• User:99.56.137.239

Supporting: User:TylerT and Philippe Beaudette

Mandate

Wikipedia started "first and foremost [as] an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality." Over the past eight years, the Wikimedia community has created a massive amount of knowledge that is available in a freely sharable format; and the community has been working towards this aspiration of "highest possible quality."

This task force will focus on developing recommendations to improve the quality of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia. While it is true that there are many different types of articles within Wikipedia, some of which fall outside what would "normally" be found in an encyclopedia, at their core, Wikipedias are modeled on and used as encyclopedias; and people who use Wikipedia have a certain expectation of quality. What can be done to continuously improve the quality of Wikipedias to meet this expectation?

The task force should develop answers to the following questions to help guide the development of 2-4 recommendations for improving the quality of Wikipedias as an encyclopedia.

1. What approaches to improving Wikipedia's quality have been tried and what has been learned? What questions remain?
2. What metrics or approaches could be used to measure quality and change in quality over time?
3. What supports (data, tools, processes, funding, training, etc.) are needed to improve the quality of Wikipedias? How might these vary based on the size or maturity of different projects?
4. Who is needed to support these efforts to improve quality (e.g., Wikimedia Foundation, chapters, individual volunteers, external partners), and what do they need to do?

Task force framework

Sub-topics have been opened for the following:

• Task force/Wikipedia Quality/Action Plan
• Task Force/Wikipedia Quality/Definition of quality
• Task force/Wikipedia Quality/Barriers to quality
• Task force/Wikipedia Quality/Content quality